Biography
Jonathan C. Gold is Professor of Religion at Princeton University. A scholar of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, he elucidates Buddhist approaches to meaning, ethics, language, and learning, defending many as intellectually prescient and illuminating for contemporary philosophical and social concerns.
His PhD is from the University of Chicago (2004) and he is the author of The Dharma’s Gatekeepers: Sakya Paṇḍita on Buddhist Scholarship in Tibet (SUNY Press, 2007) and Paving the Great Way: Vasubandhu’s Unifying Buddhist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2015), co-editor of Readings of Śāntideva’s Guide to Bodhisattva Practice (Bodhicaryāvtāra) (Columbia University Press, 2019), and the author of numerous articles.
His current work explores how Buddhist moral psychology—traditional concepts such as dependent origination, karma, and the defilements—can illuminate contemporary political reasoning and social dynamics. Since 2019, as Director of Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, he has focused on fostering public-facing scholarship on religion. He has also supported interdisciplinary research initiatives that bring Buddhist thought to bear on contemporary philosophical, social and political questions.
Candidate Statement
The AAR has been my main intellectual home for 30 years, since I was first thrilled by the amazing diversity and complexity of the perspectives shared across the panels of the Annual Meeting. Providing me the opportunity to meet and engage with scholars I admired or critiqued (or both), and to dive into new ideas, the AAR quickly became a crucial venue where I could count on colleagues to test, hone and expand my research and my thinking.
The AAR, like the study of religion more broadly, provides a model (never perfect) for the openness and inclusivity that is intrinsic to genuine growth and learning—since bias and closed-mindedness are as much the result of ignorance as they are its cause (a process in line with the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Origination). Interdisciplinarity and a challenge to norms and certainty are woven indelibly into Religious Studies. It is, consequently, an unexcelled model for how the university can present itself to the wider public, where we see grave skepticism about intellectual pursuits and their perceived politicization through diversity and inclusion efforts.
Furthermore, in its persistent return to cross-cultural, trans-regional questions, the study of religion stands as a model for how the humanities, especially, can address the wider public’s skepticism of obscure topics and arcane methods. Religious Studies provides a distinctive set of lenses on how we create meaning and understand human aspirations, which is crucial in a world where AI can provide quick answers but not necessarily the deeper insight into what questions we should be asking in the first place—questions we only uncover by freeing ourselves of conditioned habits and biases. The tools of Religious Studies are a clear instance of the continued relevance of the humanities and the importance of fostering a deeper, reflective kind of learning.
AI is thus not only a threat to education as traditionally practiced; it is also an opportunity to sharpen our sense of what is distinctive about our intellectual pursuits. It can advance our research and teaching, and it can help us improve the broader public’s understanding of and access to what we do. It can, for instance, help scholars develop pedagogical materials targeted at various educational levels—videos, podcasts, data summaries—far more efficiently than ever before.
If elected, I would seek to support these public-facing benefits of the study of religion, both within universities and in partnerships between universities and public media. How can we use the new AI tools to share our understandings as widely as possible? Modern universities and public media, working together, could foster a citizenry that is more aware of contemporary academic approaches, more sophisticated and open, and more critically engaged with government policies. This is a way we could move beyond a polarized public of passive consumers of political rhetoric. I would be honored by the opportunity to work with AAR members to launch such a vision and to position our field at the forefront of demonstrating the value of humanistic scholarship.